Check Your Referral Traffic!

Advertisers have a wide range of resources they can use to conduct marketing campaigns. It is essential to understand which marketing tools one should use in order to successfully, and profitably, reach one’s advertising goals.

For comparing the value of different online advertising methods, it is essential that you can compare referral traffic data based on your own web server. That way, you obtain (a) directly comparable data (taken with the same method for all competing websites), and (b) you do not rely on the correctness of data provided by other parties.

Analysis of your website's referral traffic data will usually confirm that our service provides significantly more referral traffic than any other photonics website. This is especially true with the purchase of our ad package. Using our platform will allow you to invest your advertising budget in the most effective marketing tool in the online photonics market, limiting your expenditure on insufficiently performing platforms, ultimately saving you money.

Photonics marketing experts that understand the importance of referral traffic data analysis have turned to our platform and have gone on to become highly satisfied customers for many years. For those new to the concept, we present a quick introduction in the following.

We first briefly explain the concept of referral traffic data.

When a user of some buyer's guide, for example, clicks on a link which leads to the website of your company (a photonics supplier), the following happens technically:

• The user's web browser sends a page request to your web server in order to load the linked page and display it.
• That page request tells your web server not only what page that user wants to load, but also usually from which other web page the user came: it transmits the URL (web address) of the page on which the link was clicked – that page is called the referrer page.
• The web server typically collects such data for a statistical analysis. For example, it may list the top referrer domains, presenting the number of referrals for each of those. It should be easy for your IT personnel to provide such data to you.

In addition to the quantity of referrals, one can usually obtain data concerning the quality of the received referral traffic:

• A simple measure is the bounce rate: the percentage of users who do not visit any additional pages on your website.
• Similarly, one may calculate the average number of additional page views after the referral.

A high traffic quality is indicated by a low bounce rate and a high number of additional page views. Typically, specialized resources such as photonics buyer's guides achieve a substantially higher traffic quality than general resources such as Google Ads, because they have a well selected audience. Our strongest competitors reach a similar traffic quality as we do, while their independently measured traffic numbers are much lower.

What you can do as a marketing person is quite simple:

• Identify a suitable person in the IT department. (In every company, there should be such a person.)
• From that person, request the number of referrals to your website from our domain (rp-photonics.com) and those of other buyer's guides (e.g. photonics.com and laserfocusworld.com), e.g. for the previous 12 months. If your company is using Google Ads, also request data for that.
• In addition to plain referral data, you may ask for the bounce rate and/or the average number of page views after a referral (see above) as a measure of the quality of referral traffic.
• Just compare those data, taking into account the amount of money paid to the corresponding resource.

You then have a good measure (a) for how many leads different resources can generate for you and (b) indirectly how much attention your ads on the corresponding websites are receiving (because e.g. low click numbers suggest that the ads have not been seen much).

Based on such data, you can make rational decisions on the use of your marketing budget, which are based on facts rather than on speculations. That should help you (a) to reach your goals and (b) to explain and justify your decisions.

Remark: Before 2020-02-15, you did probably not get any referrer information from our website if your site is registered with an HTTP URL, i.e., not with encrypted transmission via HTTPS. We then changed it on 2020-02-15 such that every web server obtains referrer information, but restricted to the origin, i.e., without information which page on our site is was.